Executions

The "Death Penalty" - A Jewish View

The anti-Jewish hate monger Mel Gibson has produced a movie entitled “The Passion of the Christ”. The purpose of this movie is to revive the ancient canard labeling all Jews as “Christ Killers” for the purpose of producing physical attacks on Jews in this country and of course Europe. At the very least it is hoped by Gibson and his Nazi friends that his move will lead to a revival of that visceral hatred of the Jewish people which made the holocaust possible.

Anyone who knows anything about Jewish history will not deny that it was precisely the “Christ killer” accusation which was responsible for so much bloodshed during 2000 years of Jewish life in Europe, ending with the mass murder of 6 million Jews by the true believers in that myth. It makes no difference whether Jews or Romans were responsible for the death of a Jew living 2000 years ago. It suffices that that which people believe is real is real in its consequences. Therefore, those who see a movie depicting a gruesome execution blamed on their Jewish neighbor will react with hatred and violence against that neighbor now. Gibson knows that and so do his apologists.

Precisely because the Christian message has been responsible for so much murder and Jewish suffering, the Catholic church issued a proclamation on October 27, 1965 beginning with the words: “Notra aetate, in qua genus humanum in dies arctius et necessitudines inter varios populus augentur, Eccelisa attentius considerate quae sit sua habitudo ad religions non-christianas," etc. or, "In our age when humanity is coming closer together and the bonds between various peoples are being strengthened, the Church examines with more attention her relations with non-Christian religions", etc. This wording is followed with a detailed discussion of the guilt of the Christian churches for the brutality shown Jews over 2 millennia and is augmented by an effort to remove the so called “blood libel” from the Jewish people. Numerous other Christian denominations followed this example in the hope of bringing to an end the causeless hatred these accusations have produced for so many centuries.

Included in this hate propaganda has always been the insane accusation that Jews are bloodthirsty. Jews are depicted in the Mel Gibson mythology as wanting to inflict the “death penalty” on the innocent. This crazed hate philosophy is based on the berserk interpretation of the Torah, which does indeed prescribe the death penalty for 36 offenses.

Many of these offenses are meaningless to us. Furthermore, neither ancient Israel enforced, nor modern Israel enforces, these laws. On the contrary. Israel has no death penalty, not even for the homicide killers who have murdered 1,000 Jews in the last three years and whose sole “cause” is the killing of Jews for the sake of killing. Once more, Israel has no death penalty.

Unfortunately, it is in our country that the majority of states continue to slaughter their own citizens indiscriminately. The leader in that slaughter is Texas. There the killing never stops. Day after day, the “Auschwitz” of Texas, Huntsville, is the scene of assembly line murder resembling the Nazi death camps of World War II. Indeed, the victims are not Jews. The victims are anybody at all. In Texas, as in the other 38 states which employ the so-called “death penalty”, it makes no difference to the prosecutors, judges, police, prison wardens and other killers whether the victim of their blood thirst is guilty of a crime or not. They kill to kill. For example: Since 1973, 111 people awaiting “execution” in various murder centers around the country were released because they were proved to be innocent of any crime. Evidently, many more of the 900 slaughtered around the country in the 38 “death penalty” states were also innocent. Recently Judge Mark A. Wolf, a Boston federal judge, wrote in the New York Times: “In the past decade, substantial evidence has emerged to demonstrate that innocent individuals are sentenced to death, and undoubtedly executed, much more often than previously understood.”

In 2000, Governor George Ryan of Illinois suspended the death “penalty” in that state because the number of innocent people on death row exceeded the number not yet found innocent. Ryan, previously a supporter of the so-called “death penalty”, did not want to be guilty of judicial murder. Despite that evidence the prosecutors in Illinois announced that they did not care one whit for the innocents they had murdered and that they hoped to kill more in the future.

The fact is that anyone who supports the so-called “death penalty” is guilty of murdering innocent people. The difference between guilt and innocence cannot be discerned. It is for that reason that 12 of our States, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, do not employ the so called death “penalty”. In fact, the word “penalty” cannot apply since innocent people murdered by the state are not being penalized. How can something be called a “penalty” when those “penalized” have committed no offense?

Israel therefore has no death penalty. Those who charge “the Jews” with being cruel are the very same people who murdered six million innocent children, women and men in the European death camps between 1933 and 1945 on the charge of being “Christ killers”, a charge Mel Gibson and his supporters hope to revive in an effort of instigating another holocaust. May they fail like Haman.

Shalom u’vracha.

Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including Grandparents:  A New Look at the Supporting Generation (with Dr. Ursula A., Falk, 2002), & Man's Ascent to Reason (2002).

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